Some creative professionals develop spherical videos for playback in virtual reality (VR) environments such as VR headsets. Although spherical videos are often intended for playback in a VR headset, editing generally occurs in conventional 2D video editing software such as Adobe® Premiere. Recently, some approaches have been developed to edit videos directly in a VR environment in which users can load a spherical video, watch the video while it plays in a VR headset, and use handheld VR controllers to control playback and edit the video.
A prior implementation of playback controls involved 3D pointing tasks. More specifically, the prior implementation required a user to point at various visualizations displayed in a VR headset (e.g., visualizations of playback and pause buttons, a video timeline, etc.). In this implementation, a user holds a handheld VR controller, and the VR headset displays a corresponding image of the controller emitting a laser pointer. When the user moves the handheld controller in the real world, the corresponding controller image and laser pointer move in the headset display. In this manner, a user can point the laser pointer at a desired playback or pause button and click to control video playback. Similarly, the user can point the laser pointer at the video timeline in the headset, and grab and scrub the timeline to adjust the location of the video to playback.